*MURDER HAS A FAVOURITE PLAYGROUND AND THE GANGS ARE IN CHARGE* By *Brett Herron,* GOOD Secretary-General The numbers tell a grim story, 25,423 people lost their lives in South Africa between April 2024 and March 2025. This is a tragedy, one that policymakers can’t spin, downplay, or hide behind minor percentage decreases. In the Western Cape, where the province has robbed the education and healthcare budgets to fund a safety plan, a chilling 4,467 murders were recorded in the 2024/2025 financial year. And although this is a decrease of 1.7% from the previous financial year, it is the second-highest annual toll in the past six years. Any celebration over a marginal decrease is not just premature, it’s deeply offensive to the communities still mourning. In Philippi East, 231 people were murdered this past year, the highest number recorded there in six years. Kraaifontein has seen a similar spike with 216 murders compared to last year’s 165 murders. These aren’t isolated flare-ups. They’re symptoms of a much deeper crisis, the grip of gang violence on the province. Gang-related murders are not a footnote; they are the headline. In just the last quarter alone, 208 lives were claimed by gang activity. Over the full financial year, that number rose to 882 gang-related killings in the Western Cape. To put this in context: of the 1,025 gang-related murders reported nationally, 86% happened in one province. The Western Cape is home to less than 12% of the country’s population (according to the 2022 Census), yet it bears the weight of nearly nine in ten gang murders in South Africa. This is not just a crime problem. It’s a policy failure. It’s a collapse of prevention, intervention, and protection. For years, Premier Alan Winde has claimed the brilliant “Western Cape Safety Plan” will halve the murder rate in ten years. Well six years into the plan that has already cost Billions and we see an average year-on-year murder increase of 2.48%. The Western Cape’s communities, especially on the Cape Flats, are being left to bleed out. Homes are turning into conflict zones. Children grow up to the sound of gunfire, not lullabies. Parents worry more about stray bullets than school fees. We must start to call this what it is - a war. And the state is either losing it, or not truly fighting it. The province has a murder problem. But even more urgently, it has a gang murder problem. And when murder has a favourite face, when it is so consistently racialised, spatialized, and ignored, it becomes clear that this crisis is no accident. It is a result of decades of neglect, spatial injustice, and failed governance. Until we address the root causes, poverty, unemployment, broken education systems, housing precarity, and the deep legacies of apartheid spatial planning, we will be here again next year. Mourning more names and digging more graves. Murder has a favourite face in the Western Cape. And unless we act, that face will keep looking younger.